In recent years, home Wi-Fi networks have become very popular. Wi-Fi networks are typically deployed with a wireless router device which may be pre-configured. A user's home wireless router device is often included during the installation of internet access by the user's internet service provider (ISP).
Similarly to Wi-Fi routers, smart phone mobile devices provisioned with Wi-Fi connectivity have become ubiquitous in recent years. A user of a smart phone typically subscribes to a cellular network carrier in order to use the smart phone to make voice calls over the carrier's circuit-switched network and to access the internet over the carrier's packet-switched network via a licensed communications channel such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) broadband.
Since it is common for a user to own both a Wi-Fi router and a smart phone, users often have more than one way for their smart phone to access the internet. However, since carriers typically charge a higher premium than ISPs for such data, a user may often wish to connect their smart phone to the Wi-Fi router via the smart phone's Wi-Fi radio rather than using the carrier's packet-switched network.
Additionally, rather than utilizing a carrier's network to make a voice call, a user may want to utilize a Wi-Fi network to make a voice call via their ISP. While many voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions have allowed for this type of call, conventional solutions have not allowed calls to be made to and from wireless subscriber phone numbers. For this reason, some smart phones have become provisioned with the ability to initiate and receive voice calls from wireless subscriber phone numbers via their Wi-Fi router.
However, conventional Wi-Fi routers may not be configured to allow a consistent acceptable quality of service (QoS) for users engaging in a Wi-Fi call. For example, a user may be likely to experience a dropped voice call when attempting to engage in a Wi-Fi call via a Wi-Fi router that is concurrently being used by other networked devices for activities with typically high data use such as streaming video and browsing the internet. Users may be less forgiving of a drop in quality of service of a voice call than that of another service such as video streaming. Conversely, a particular user may wish rather to give precedence to another service, such as the quality of their streaming video.
Further, a user may wish to allow a guest access to a home Wi-Fi router without allowing the guest to access the local resources connected to the router. However, conventional routers may not have a way to ensure that the quality of the services in use by non-guests is not greatly impeded by heavy usage by the guest. Similarly, a Wi-Fi router with several connected devices corresponding to several types of transferred data may not have a way to ensure that a particular type of transferred data is not blocked by the transfer of other types of data.